SECRET 15

Everything Is Useful

“Data! Data! Data!” he cried impatiently. “I can’t make bricks without clay.”

—“THE ADVENTURE OF THE COPPER BEECHES”

 

 

 

 

 

City birds are tough. I discovered this fact when I moved to Washington, DC, in the mid-1990s after spending most of my life in rural Arkansas. My mother collected birds’ nests, and I was very familiar with the types of nests that country birds created: all-natural, symmetrical, aesthetically pleasing. But after a few months in the city, I realized that urban birds had an entirely different approach to nest building. Whereas my country birds worked only with organic materials—straw, grass, leaves, flowers—DC birds didn’t have that luxury. They lived in a world of asphalt, pollution, traffic jams, and huge concrete buildings, so when it came to building nests, the big-city birds improvised. They used trash. Lots and lots of trash.

Do you know the number one building material preferred by urban birds? Those long, thin, jagged strips of cardboard that you tear off to open packages sent by overnight courier companies. They are perfect insulation for nests, and they’re strong enough to provide reinforcement to the entire structure. One strip is long enough to wind around the entire length of a good-size nest; it’s the equivalent of a steel girder in a modern office building. In DC and other large cities, you’ll find dozens of these strips in gutters because people anxious to get at whatever’s inside that box simply rip ’em, toss ’em, and forget ’em. For birds, finding one of those strips is like stumbling across a brand-new twenty-dollar bill.

One man’s trash is another bird’s treasure. More than treasure, actually—it constitutes a huge part of the bird’s life. Without that trash, nests couldn’t be built in the city, bird homes couldn’t be established, and little city birds couldn’t be born. In fact, from the bird’s point of view, there’s no such thing as trash, just resources waiting to be utilized.

When it comes to the creative process, we can learn a lot from those city birds. Inspiration can come from anywhere; you don’t need a password or special permission to access it. The raw materials for creating art—be it a painting, story, poem, or song—are all around us. If you don’t believe me, just take a look at Arthur Conan Doyle’s body of work.

The Sherlock Holmes stories, universally recognized as some of the greatest mystery stories ever written in any language, are literary patchwork quilts, Frankenstein monsters made up of hundreds of pieces of Conan Doyle’s life. Virtually every Holmes story has at least one or two details that Conan Doyle plucked from his own experiences. He took ordinary reality and molded it into extraordinary fiction.

We’ve already seen how the character of Sherlock Holmes was inspired by two of his professors in medical school, Dr. Joseph Bell and Sir Robert Christison. In a letter to Conan Doyle in 1893, friend and fellow writer Robert Louis Stevenson complimented Conan Doyle on his “very ingenious and very interesting adventures of Sherlock Holmes,” but added, “Only the one thing troubles me: can this be my old friend Joe Bell?” The character’s very name was also a product of Conan Doyle’s upbringing: “Sherlock” was the surname of a school chum from childhood, and many scholars believe “Holmes” was a reference to his mother’s friend, the American physician and intellectual Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (“Never have I so known and loved a man whom I have never seen,” he wrote.) As a teenager, Conan Doyle was sent to a Scottish boarding school, Stonyhurst, where he met a pair of brothers named Moriarty, later appropriated as the name of Holmes’s greatest rival. A chance meeting with a newspaper reporter on an ocean voyage who later charmed Conan Doyle with ghostly tales of Devonshire, the brooding area of England where the journalist had grown up, sparked the idea for Conan Doyle’s most famous Holmes story, The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Conan Doyle didn’t rest on his laurels, waiting for inspiration to strike him—he realized early on that it surrounded him at all times. All he had to do was reach out and take what he needed, like plucking a piece of fruit from a tree. If you find yourself stuck, lacking inspiration for your artistic endeavors, remember that Conan Doyle created literary gold out of common details. In and of themselves, each piece didn’t amount to much—a borrowed name here, an old recollection there—but once assembled into a whole, their power was unmistakable. Conan Doyle used the same principle in building his plots: Holmes solved seemingly impossible mysteries by focusing on ordinary, everyday details that everyone else overlooked.

Maybe the next great idea for a product or service won’t be discovered at an expensive business seminar, but in the streets of your very own neighborhood, by focusing on the simple, unglamorous problems facing local businessmen. The painter Edward Hopper didn’t have to travel to faraway European locales to find arresting subjects for his art; he found them on the very “ordinary” streets of New York City. Everyone else ignored the middle-class people on their way to work and the half-empty cafés on street corners, but not Hopper. He learned to see—really see—what was right in front of his nose, and found enough drama and human complexity to rival any play by Shakespeare. The result was a series of classic American paintings like “Nighthawks.” So think about it. Could your inspiration be hiding behind the ordinary details of your own life?